With Optane Memory, Intel Claims To Make Hard Drives Faster Than SSDs (pcworld.com)

SSDs are generally faster than hard drives. However, they are also usually more expensive. Intel wants to change that with its new Optane Memory lineup, which it claims is faster and better performing than SSDs while not requiring customers to break their banks. From a report on PCWorld: Announced Monday morning, these first consumer Optane-based devices will be available April 24 in two M.2 trims: A 16GB model for $44 and a 32GB Optane Memory device for $77. Both are rated for crazy-fast read speeds of 1.2GBps and writes of 280MBps. [...] When the price of a 128GB SATA SSD is roughly $50 to $60 today, you may rightly wonder why Optane Memory would be worth the bother. Intel says most consumers just don't want to give up the capacity for their photos and videos. PC configurations with a hard drive and an SSD, while standard for higher-end PC users, isn't popular for the newbies. Think of the times you've had friends or family fill up the boot drive with cat pictures, but the secondary drive is nearly empty. Intel Optane Memory would give that mainstream user the same or better performance as an SSD, with the capacity advantage of the 1TB or 2TB drive they're used to. Intel claims Optane Memory performance is as good or better than an SSD's, offering better latency by magnitudes and the ability to peak at much lower queue depths.

Comments

Re:But

[s122604]

Can wouldn't indeed!

Thanks for the ad, I guess, but you missed somethi

[Wulf2k]

So these high-priced, low-capacity drives are meant to fill the need for low-priced, high-capacity drives?

Shouldn't the summary at least attempt to fill in the gaps here?

Intel is blowing

[m.dillon]

Smoke. Total and complete nonsense. Why would I want to buy their over-priced octane junk verses a Samsung 951* or 960* NVMe drive? Far more storage for around $115-$130, 1.4 GBytes/sec consistent read performance, decent write performance, and decent durability.

P.S. the Intel 600P NVMe drive is also horrid, don't buy it.

http://apollo.backplane.com/DF...

-Matt

Re:Thanks for the ad, I guess, but you missed some

[Archangel Michael]

A lot of products flat out fail trying to recover R&D expenses. I am not saying this is one of those, as Intel has huge resources behind any tech it brings to market.

The idea here (in the long run), is that Drives and "memory" become the same space. Instant on, fast access to Nonvolatile RAM, and RAM becomes equivalent to 4 tier processor cache.

I've long predicted that memory space is going to be flattened out and everything is going to be mapped as one big logical drive, measured in access speed to data that is frequently needed. Closer / Faster, Further / Slower